The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross [61]
★★Ramona? You busy?★★
★★Powdering my nose. What’s up?★★
I stare at the car ahead of me, trying to visualize it well enough to shove it at her as a concrete image. ★★I’ve got company. The unwelcome kind.★★
★★Surprise!★★ I can feel her chuckle. ★★What did you do to annoy them?★★
★★Oh, this ’n’ that.★★ I’m not about to go into my snooping activities just yet. ★★Billington’s yacht is anchored off North Point, and some of the locals aren’t too happy about it.★★
★★Surprise indeed. So what’s with the car?★★
★★They’ve been tailing me!★★ I sound a bit peevish to myself—petulant, even. ★★And Billington’s got the marina under surveillance. He’s using seagulls as watchers. That makes me nervous.★★ I couldn’t care less about the flying sea-rats, but I’m not terribly happy about the fact that someone aboard that yacht has got the nous to run the Invocation of Al-Harijoun on them, not to mention having enough spare eyeballs to monitor the surveillance take from several hundred zombie seagulls.
★★So why don’t you lose them?★★
I take a deep breath. ★★That would entail breaking the traffic regulations, you know? I’m not supposed to do that. It’s called drawing undue attention to yourself. Besides, there’s a whole stack of documents to file, starting with a form A-19/B, or they’ll throw the book at me. I could lose my license!★★
★★What, your license to kill?★★
★★No, my license to drive!★★ I thump the steering wheel in frustration. ★★This isn’t some kind of spy farce: I’m just a civil servant. I don’t have a license to kill, or authorization to poke my nose into random corners of the world and meet interesting people and hurt them. Capisce?★★
For a moment I feel dizzy. I pinch the bridge of my nose and take a deep breath: my vision fades out for a scary moment, then comes back with this weird sense that I’m looking through two sets of eyes at once. ★★What the fuck?★★
★★It’s me, Bob. I can’t keep this up for long . . . Look, you see that SUV parked ahead?★★
★★Yeah?★★ I’m looking at it but it doesn’t register.
★★The guy who just got out of it and is walking towards you is carrying a gun. And he doesn’t look particularly friendly. Now I know you’re hung-up on the speed limit and stuff, but can I suggest you—★★
There is one good thing about driving a Smart car: it has a turning circle tighter than Ramona’s hips. I hit the gas and yank the wheel and make the tires squeal, rocking from side to side so badly that for a moment I’m afraid the tiny car is about to topple over. The bad guy raises his pistol slowly but I’ve floored the accelerator and it’s not that slow in a straight line. My wards are prickling and tickling like a sandstorm and there’s a faint blue aura crawling over the dash. Something smacks into the tailgate—a stray pebble, I tell myself as I swerve back up the coast road towards Orléans.
★★I knew you could do it!★★ Ramona enthuses like she’s channeling a cheerleader. ★★What did you do to get them riled up like that?★★
★★I asked about Marc.★★ I glance in the mirror and flinch; my tail is back in the SUV and has gotten it turned around. It’s kicking up a plume of dust as it follows me. I swerve wildly to overtake a Taurus full of pensioners who’re drifting along the crest of the road with their left turn signal flashing continuously, then I overcompensate to avoid rolling the Smart.
★★That wasn’t very fucking clever of you, was it?★★ she asks sharply. ★★Why did you do it?★★ Irrelevant distractions nag at the edges of my perception: a twin-engine pond-hopper buzzes overhead on final approach into Grand Case Airport.
★★I wanted to see if my suspicions were correct.★★ And if I was dreaming or not.
There’s a van ahead, moving slowly, so I pull out to look past it and there